Thank you, again, for all the great community feedback. Including some responses below:
Delegate Applications
The proposed Endorsed Delegate application process will be essential to the success of House of Stake governance. It is designed to allow delegates to express their experience and authority on matters pertinent to HOS governance, promote transparency and disclosure of COI, and enforce relevant compliance standards. These applications will include requirements and segments such as:
- Historic engagement in the Near ecosystem and protocol.
- Alignment with the Near ecosystem.
- Conflicts of interest.
- Historic and target voting participation.
- A delegate Code of Conduct, including expectations regarding integrity, transparency, accountability, and active participation.
To maintain endorsed delegate status, they will also be required to meet the following standards:
- Voting participation needs to be > 80%.
- Submit their rationale for their votes.
Endorsed Delegates set the tone of the governance forum, and they steer the proposals in the right direction by giving their guidance & feedback in an objective manner
Delegate Engagement
The delegation will remain decentralized, allowing delegates to both receive and grant delegation permissionlessly via the on-chain governance system. The standard of communication is a requirement of Endorsed Delegates; the community will have the power to actively monitor and ensure that non-communicative or negligent delegates are revoked of their Endorsed Delegate status by making a proposal to remove a delegate from the forum. It’s important to note that this role exists to ensure participation, not delegate opinion (to which they are entitled as delegates of the protocol)
As per delegate removal, the structure here is designed to execute delegate removal in instances of harm to the community. Where stake-weighted voting should theoretically help address incentive alignment toward bad actors gaining outsized power, the Screening Committee is independent of the Security Council and will serve as a last-resort defense against bad actors of higher severity, including the potential of malicious collusion or governance attacks. We believe that the Committee will be appropriately positioned to execute blacklisting in extreme cases.
Preventing Fatigue
The presence of the Screening Committee has an added benefit in its ability to fight voter fatigue. So they can screen the first level of spam/fraudulent proposals. With the spam/fraud filtered by the Screening Committee, Delegates can focus on the important proposals & spend their time on proposals that have the potential to contribute significantly to the NEAR ecosystem.
Concerns re: Whales and Collusion
House of Stake is designed to help deter governance attacks in two manners:
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Presence of Screening Committee: When an attack occurs, the Screening Committee acts as a first line of defense. They can make it significantly harder for malicious proposals to pass by requiring a 75% approval (rather than a 51% approval) for their ratification.
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Security Council as Emergency Backstop: If both the Screening Committee and the delegate system approve a compromised proposal, the Security Council can upgrade the protocol to include protective measures, stop the proposal, and block the attack.
We want to reiterate that the Screening Committee can only increase/decrease the quorum. A Screening Committee cannot veto any proposals; it just makes it harder for “bad proposals” to pass
Delegate Incentives
Once the proposed “Call for Delegates” and the initial tranche of Endorsed Delegates have been approved, Gauntlet will propose comprehensive delegate incentives and a compensation plan. We will certainly consider these (and other) community comments and feedback. The delegate compensation plan will be transparent, with a Total Reward amount to be voted on and approved by the community. The Gauntlet applied research team continues optimizing this formula and conducting independent research and academic review (i.e. research paper here).
Incentives to veNEAR Holders
The 580,000 NEAR here refers only to the first phase of incentives, which will roll out veNEAR holders targeting 10 million NEAR locked-in veNEAR Contracts. As the total NEAR locked in veNEAR contracts increase, the minimum required annual NEAR rewards paid to veNEAR holders will also increase. As discussed in section 4.2.5.1, Gauntlet will be available to fine-tune this and give a deep dive on each presented solution once the proposal is accepted & veNEAR is live.
Regarding LSTs, work is ongoing to make veNEAR compatible with non-LSTs, and we will have further updates on this shortly.
Regarding locking mechanisms, the rate of increase in veNEAR Premium is linear in nature for both Rolling Lock & Fixed Lock. So, the rate of increase for 1 veNEAR per epoch is the same for every user. The difference comes from the amount of time locked up by a user. The higher the lock-up period, the higher the premium a user will be able to receive on veNEAR. It is important to note that veNEAR can have a max premium of 200%, which happens at 4 years
Legacy Stakers and LSTs
We want to ensure the community that we’ve heard and are actively responding to feedback concerning the development of tooling that allows legacy stakes to select their validator and receive veNEAR without requiring them to utilize LSTs or change their chosen validator. The Gauntlet and Near Foundation will continue to update the community as progress continues.
Lastly, many community concerns regarding fatigue, governance design, and delegate expectations can and will continue to be adapted as the DAO evolves. It’s important to remember that this proposal lays a strong foundation for the House of Stake, but the future of near governance is intended to evolve along with its community, protocol ecosystem, and technical development.
Next Steps:
With the 2 week period of feedback coming to an end, Gauntlet will work with the Near Foundation and community to provide the details of the mechanism update to enable legacy stakers to receive veNEAR, and move forward with the proposal.